Sony has announced Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4. It's a prototype for now, but Sony intends to develop it further for a commercial launch.
Morpheus is a visor style head-mounted display that works with the PlayStation Camera to deliver a virtual reality experience. Inertial sensors are built into the head mount unit and the Camera, which the headset requires to work, tracks head orientation and movement so as the player's head rotates the image of the virtual world rotates in real-time.
It also works with the PS Move motion controller. Morpheus reproduces the player's hands and sword, for example, within the game so the player feels like they are physically fighting enemies.
3D audio comes from the front, behind, left and right, recreating stereoscopic sounds heard from below and above.
At the Game Developers Conference this week Sony is showing off the tech with a demo of CCP's space dogfighting game Eve Valkyrie, which is also in development for rival VR headset Oculus Rift, Eidos Montreal's Thief and a couple of its own tech demos: The Castle, which uses the Move controller, and The Deep, which lets you observe waters from inside a shark proof cage.

They described a pretty cool scenario where you'd run a cable out of the headset's A/V box to your TV and see a single-screen version of the VR game on that screen. A second player could then grab a controller and play a game along with the VR player. As an example, Yoshida said that in The Deep, a second player can control the path of a turtle that swims around the diving cage. He said that VR offered a lot of possibilities for asynchronous gaming similar to the Wii U, with several players playing on the TV taking on the VR player. The setup will allow for four controllers, and while the headset currently counts for one of them, Marks said that they're still figuring out whether it'll always be that way.P

They're not distributing advance or prototype headsets for PC indie developers, for now it'll be only for developers making games on PS4. P

Yoshida confirmed that the commercial release will not happen in 2014. P

Yoshida said that Sony is working on dedicated gaming experiences for Morpheus, indicating that Sony's approach will involve making games that are just for Morpheus and would also explore allowing there to be Morpheus-only modes for non-VR games. They specifically said they don't want to just port PS4 games to Morpheus, for example, a normal PS4 FPS that would also be playable in VR.